The distribution business has a beast looming in the back of the closet. It lurks in your inside sales group, thrives in your sales department and sucks the lifeās blood from your bottom line. What is this savage? Itās the practice of cost-plus pricing. Every industry has one - for the electrical wholesaler itās cost plus 20, or others itās cost plus 10, 20, 25 or 30%. As an industry we have talked about cost-plus pricing for decades, yet it manages to survive. If your organization doesnāt have a clear cut process for pricing, itās still hiding in the deep recesses of your company. And, it needs to be killed ā before it kills you. Hereās how it works. A customer calls in and asks one of your employees for price and availability on a product. Somehow, someway they believe the āsystem priceā shown on the computer is too high, inaccurate, not supported or non-stock. They quickly look up your cost and then - the monster appears. Instead of measuring the cost of ordering, fr...